The Martian by Andy Weir

I don’t know why I skipped this book back when it came out. I remember it got a lot of hype, and that I’d recently been burning on some other titles being overhyped. Anyways, the book recently came out in paperback, and was chosen for the December book for my book club. The hype had long since died down, and I’d be discussing the book among friends, so the time was ripe for me to dive in.

Let’s get this out of way first – I absolutely, freakin’ LOVED Andy Weir’s The Martian. I’d sit down, planning to read a chapter or two, or maybe 20 pages, and before I knew it an hour had gone by and I’d devoured a chunk of the book and bitten of half my fingernails in the process. This is one helluva page turner, and Weir pulls the best kind of trick possible: You really don’t know what’s going to happen until the very last few pages.

The blurb on the back of the book sums up the basics nicely:

“Six days ago astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars.

Now he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there.

After a dust storm forces his crew to evacuate the planet while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded on Mars’s surface, with no way to signal Earth that he’s alive. And even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone years before a rescue could arrive.

Changes are, though, Mark won’t have time to starve to death.”

From the very first sentence, the question becomes is he going to survive, or die? Will this book have a happy ending or a sad one? Mark’s first priority, obviously, is how to not die quickly. How will he make sure he has air to breathe inside the habitat? How we he ensure that he has enough water to drink? Food is another issue, especially since starving is a matter of when, not if. Most of the book is all Mark Watney all the time, so your enjoyment of the book depends greatly on if you like him or not.

Personally, I couldn’t get enough of his gallows humor, his smarts, his snark, and his impatient streak. He makes the best of a shitty situation and realizes that when you don’t have to get permission from NASA, you can take apart any damn thing you want and put it back together however you want. He kept his cool in a situation that would have me screaming, crying, and having a nervous breakdown. But then again, do we really know how honest he’s being in his journal? He could be crying himself to sleep for all we know. Adding the variable of a possibly unreliable narrator actually makes his story all the most interest, in my opinion.

This happens pretty early in the book, so I don’t feel it’s a spoiler: through satellite imagery, NASA discovers that Mark is alive. They can watch him, but they can’t get a message to him. Mark Watney becomes a media sensation, everyone wants to know about the man left behind, and suddenly “can we save him?” becomes the most important and most expensive question. Weir throws some big questions at the reader: How much is one life worth? How should his crewmates be told that he’s still alive? When (if ever) is it moral to tell someone to track their research and then lie down and die?

Regardless of if you like Mark’s personality or not, the more you get to know him, the more you will want him to live. You’ll want his contraptions to work, you’ll be rooting for him, you’ll want to hear his next joke, you’ll want him to not go crazy, you will want him to live.

Something that was a plus for me, but seemed to turn a lot of readers off was the straight up engineering math. Mark’s survival depends on using scarce resources in just the right way. How fast does the oxygenator work? How can he get hydrogen, and how much will he need to make a certain amount of water? How much battery power will you get from so many solar panels if they are only charging at 80% efficiency? There are a lot of paragraphs of how will he turn ABC into a specific quantity of XYZ, and the math gets very detailed. I’ve been told a lot of readers didn’t like this, but it actually worked very well for me, and even Mark jokes about how much math he’s doing. Algebra word problems all day long? No wonder he doesn’t go crazy, he’s in engineering heaven!

Like I said at the beginning of this review, The Martian is a freakin’ brilliant book. The further I got into it, the more I enjoyed it. Mark Watney is obviously the main character, but we meet others as well, who are as developed as time allows. There are some other plot points that proved fascinating as well. Weir took what was at first a completely binary idea (0 = he lives, 1 = he dies), and turned it into an unquantifiable emotional roller coaster.

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So, how’s it end? I’m not going to tell you. But I will tell you that I cried, a lot, and then I desperately wanted to watch the Apollo 13 movie, (damn you Netflix for not having it on streaming!) and the movie Moon (which I was able to borrow from a friend). Somehow I thought those two movies would give me some kind of closure. The Martian is the kind of book that once you know how it ends, you really don’t need to ever read it again, because it has one of those big reveals that you never forget. I’ll never forget the ending of this book. And I can’t wait to read it again.

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20 Responses to "The Martian by Andy Weir"

I did something similar. I bought it not long after its release but then waited. It wasn’t consciously so the hype would die down, but I do think that played a part in my decision making at the time.

But wow, did I love this one when I read it last month!

I liked the fact that Watney’s character is so obviously blogging, if that makes sense. His journal entries read like someone playing to an audience, which is what I feel like we do when we blog, at least about personal things. We edit our thoughts and try to craft them creatively to entertain and engage, which is what I felt like Watney was doing. It is what we don’t see, but know had to be going on-he’s human after all-that added a level of interest to his updates regarding his situation.

This is the second time I’ve seen this book mentioned in so many days, so it’s bumping up my TBR list. I love the concept- it also makes a lot of sense as a movie, which is why I guess they’re making one.

I know exactly what you mean about books being overhyped and that being a turnoff (sometimes). I sometimes want to come at something in my own time, not be driven to it. In the case of this book, I heard of it, and heard it was getting good reviews, but my immediate friends weren’t inundating me with reviews, so I didn’t get that feeling. And your review makes it sound like something I’d really like!

I’m a big fan of The Martian, too. Yes, it had math. No, a little math won’t kill ya. The story was captivating from page first to page last, and I love a story that can be about real science AND be such a great read.

I was skimming through my RSS backlog and I saw the cover of The Martian pop up and I was like, good, someone’s reading that awesome book! And then I was like, wait, Andrea’s reading it? Now? For the first time? :dies of shock: I am so glad you loved it as much as I did, and that you loved the math, too, because I super geeked out over all the equations. 🙂

Nice review. My experience is the same – it is really hard to put that book down.
One question remains though, which popped in my mind after not shaving for 5 days: what the heck was he doing with his hair and nails?

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some of the books reviewed here were free ARCs supplied by publishers/authors/other groups. Some of the books here I got from the library. the rest I *gasp!* actually paid for. I'll do my best to let you know what's what.